"Disembodied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not last. There he was informed of his retirement from the army, and that his pension (calculated on the scale of a colonel's rank) was made dependent on the correctness of his conduct, and on the good reports of the police. No longer in the army! He felt suddenly strange to the earth, like a disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist. But at first he reacted from sheer incredulity. This could not be. He waited for thunder, earthquakes, natural cataclysms; but nothing happened. The leaden weight of an irremediable idleness descended upon General Feraud, who having no ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... saying, "Friends, this is all gone to coloured cobweb, we regret to say!"—and retire into the fields to cultivate onion-beds, and live frugally on vegetables. It is very notable. Old godlike Calvinism declares that its old body is now fallen to tatters, and done; and its mournful ghost, disembodied, seeking new embodiment, pipes again in the winds;—a ghost and spirit as yet, but heralding new Spirit-worlds, and better Dynasties ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... a curse. There was nobody in the room, but the voice had been louder than ever he had heard it before. It seemed as though it emanated from a disembodied spirit that was floating through the air. There was a ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... might as well charge the crime up to the spirits and drop the case!" he said ironically. "No, Greig, we're not going on a still hunt for murderous, disembodied shades. We're going after living people—and we're not going very far. What puzzles you and the clerks—how anyone managed to get to him and fire the shot—is so simple that I'm surprised you're worrying over it. I ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... cried, and devoured her hands with ghostly kisses. "It seems an eternity that I've been struggling back to you through the outer void and what-not. Sometimes, I confess I all but despaired. Life is not, I assure you, all beer and skittles for the disembodied." ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... my sins many. What if there be an avenging Power waiting, as some think, to grind me into powder, and then endow each crushed particle with individual sense of endless misery? What if there be a hell! In a few minutes, or what will seem but a few minutes —for surely, to the disembodied spirit, time cannot exist; though it sleep a billion years, it will be as a breath—I shall have solved the problem. I shall know what all the panic-stricken millions madly ask, and ask in vain! Yes, I shall know if there is a hell! Well, if there be, then I shall rule ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... in honour of the deceased. Mr. Gill justly calls attention to the beauty of the last stanza but one, where "the spirit of the girl is believed to follow the sun, tripping lightly over the crest of the billows, and sinking with the sun into the underworld (Avaiki), the home of disembodied spirits." ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... the former is but an antitype) be raised, at the omnific word of the Grand Master of the Universe, from time to eternity; from the tomb of corruption to the chambers of hope; from the darkness of death to the celestial beams of life; and that his disembodied spirit shall be conveyed as near to the holy of holies of the divine presence as humanity can ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... crowning fascination of the sea, the consummation of such might in such infantine delicacy. You may notice it again in the summer, when our bay is thronged for miles on miles with inch-long jelly-fishes,—lovely creatures, in shape like disembodied gooseberries, and shot through and through in the sunlight with all manner of blue and golden glistenings, and bearing tiny rows of fringing oars that tremble like a baby's eyelids. There is less of gross substance in them than in any other created thing,—mere water and outline, ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... in the increasing silence the roar of London sounded more intensely. From the darkness, as if it were the scene of a play, James watched the cabs and 'buses pass rapidly in the light, the endless procession of people like disembodied souls drifting aimlessly before the wind. It was a comfort and a relief to sit there unseen, under cover of the night. He observed the turmoil with a new, disinterested curiosity, feeling strangely as if he ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... sensation left me, to be replaced by a new and spiritual terror. I, or rather my disembodied consciousness, seemed to come up for judgment, and the horror of it was that I appeared to be my own judge. There, a very embodiment of cold justice, my Spirit, grown luminous, sat upon a throne and to it, with dread and merciless particularity I set out all my misdeeds. It was as if ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... sky. Shall we not call him Prospero who held In his enchanted hands the fateful key Of that tempestuous hour's mystery, And with controlling wand our spirits spelled, With him to wander by a sun-bright shore, To hear fine, fairy voices, and to fly With disembodied Ariel once more Above earth's wrack and ruin? Far and nigh The laughter of the thunder echoed loud, And harmless lightnings leapt ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... of Elohim is applied to a ghost, or disembodied soul, conceived as the image of the body in which it once dwelt, is of no little importance. For it is well known that the same term was employed to denote the gods of the heathen, who were thought to have definite quasi-corporeal forms and to be ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... woman? For have I not felt twenty times the desolate advantage of being insulated here and of not minding anybody when I made my poems?—of living a little like a disembodied spirit, and caring less for suppositious criticism than for the black fly buzzing in the pane?—That made me what dear Mr. Kenyon calls 'insolent,'—untimid, and unconventional in my degree; and not so much by strength, you see, as by separation. You touch your greater ends by mere strength; ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... the three principal contrivers of Michizane's disgrace, Fujiwara Tokihira, Fujiwara Sugane, and Minamoto Hikaru, all expired within a few years' interval. At that epoch a wide-spread belief existed in the powers of disembodied spirits for evil or for good. Such a creed grew logically out of the cult of ancestor worship. It began to be whispered abroad that Michizane's spirit was taking vengeance upon his enemies. The ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the Easy Chair for hard upon fifty years had been forecast in these words, and while the warehouse agent stood waiting his pleasure, the Easy Chair fetched a long, deep sigh. Sigh one must call the sound, but it was rather like that soft complaint of the woody fibres in a table which disembodied spirits are about to visit, and which continues to exhale from it till their peculiar vocabulary utters itself in a staccato of muffled taps. No one who has heard that sound can mistake it for another, and the unreal editor knew ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... true and perfect image of life indeed. Or rather (for the full majesty of such a power is not thus sufficiently expressed) let him consider that it would be in effect nothing else than a capacity of transporting himself at any moment into any scene—a gift as great as can be possessed by a disembodied spirit: and suppose, also, this necromancy embracing not only the present but the past, and enabling us seemingly to enter into the very bodily presence of men long since gathered to the dust; to behold them ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... suicide of Zenobia; and yet on the whole the effect of the novel is to make one think more agreeably of life. The standpoint of the narrator has the advantage of being a concrete one; he is no longer, as in the preceding tales, a disembodied spirit, imprisoned in the haunted chamber of his own contemplations, but a particular man, ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in such an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd Girl's suddenly stiffening ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... the spear! You feel us near In many a ghastly dream; With fancy's eye Our forms you spy, And hear our fatal scream. With clearer sight Ere falls the night, Just when to weal or woe Your disembodied souls take flight On trembling wing—each startled sprite Our choir of death ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... amongst whom he lived. In his dramatic writings this language took on a kind of rhythm which had the effect of producing a certain remoteness of the highest possible artistic value. The people of his imagination appear a little disembodied. They talk with that straightforward and simple kind of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of Maeterlinck's earlier plays. Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw the subject-matter of his art "with wise, clear-seeing, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... that state. It was far more probable that it had remained over in my mind, on waking from the swoon, merely because it was the latest of a series of impressions received while outside the body. That these impressions were of a kind most strange and startling, seeing that they were those of a disembodied soul exercising faculties more spiritual than those of the body, I could not doubt. The desire to know what they had been grew upon me, till it became a longing which left me no repose. It seemed intolerable that I should have secrets from myself, that my soul should withhold its ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... are supposed to be consigned to the abodes of the disembodied spirits, who are punished according to the nature of their crimes. For instance, saki merchants who have sold bad spirit are believed to be confined in stagnant pools; and murderers are supposed to haunt the ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... evident that Potter was of a spiritual temperament, and was indebted to a spirit influence for his impressions and convictions. But whatever is possible to the disembodied spirit in the intellectual way is also possible to the embodied spirit which has not lost its material body, if the interior faculties are well developed and prophecy does not require supernal aid. In innumerable cases mesmeric subjects, in their somniloquent condition, have made most accurate predictions ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... tense. There was nothing rigid about Arnold. He was relaxed in an exhausted passivity, a beaten man. Let what would, befall. He seemed beyond feeling. She knew that probably never again, so life goes, could they speak together thus, like disembodied spirits, freed for once from the blinding, entangling tragic web of self-consciousness. She wondered again if he would find it in his heart to speak to her of Judith. She remembered something else she had meant to ask him, if she ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... back at those young figures groping through cloud as at disembodied and blessed spirits. The man's intensest tenderness, restrained by his virginhood and his awe of the supple delicate shape at his side, was put forth only in her service. They walked against bushes. He broke a stick, and with it probed every yard of the ascent which they were obliged to make. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... appearance, or developed after the divine ideal. Her sincerity was terrible. In her frank exposure no foible was spared, though by her very reproof she roused dormant courage and self-confidence. And so unerring seemed her insight, that her companion felt as if standing bare before a disembodied spirit, and communicated without reserve thoughts and emotions, which, even to himself, he had ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... [FN362] These disembodied "voices" speaking either naturally or through instruments are a recognized phenomenon of the so-called "Spiritualism," See p. 115 of "Supra-mundane Facts," &c., edited by T.J. Nichols, M.D., &c., London, Pitman, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... term. It never expresses, as spirit does, the idea of soul or of animating mood or purpose. With reference to incorporeal beings, it denotes (except in the phrase "the Holy Ghost") the reappearance of the dead in disembodied form. Spirit may denote a variety of incorporeal beings—among them angels, fairies (devoid of moral nature), and personalities returned from the grave and manifested—seldom visibly—through spiritualistic ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... called to any particular part or member of my body, I may be morally sure that there is something amiss in the processes of that part or member. As long as the whole economy of the frame goes on well and without interruption, our attention is not called to it. The intellectual man is like a disembodied spirit. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... their voices, save in memory; But messages of love give us assurance That we are not forgotten. Who shall say That from the world of spirits comes no greeting, No message of remembrance? It may be The thoughts that visit us, we know not whence, Sudden as inspiration, are the whispers Of disembodied spirits, speaking to us As friends, who wait outside a prison wall, Through the barred windows speak to those ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling. All of us have been thirsty thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one particular pailful of water, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Carmichael, "and now I begin to feel like a disembodied spirit—a 'young-eyed cherubim.' I seem to belong already to a better planet. Should you not like to dwell here for ever, far away from the carking cares ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... festivities of a ball-room at some lordly mansion in the country, and to have wandered into a churchyard, damp and dreary with a thick London fog. In the light dress of fashion, he throws himself on a tombstone. "Ye dead!" exclaims the hero, "where are ye? Do your disembodied spirits now float around me, and, shrouded in this horrible veil of nature, glare unseen upon vitality? Float ye upon this intolerable mist, in yourselves still more misty and intolerable? Hold ye high jubilee to-night? or do ye crouch behind these monitorial stones, gibbering and chattering ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... be a retired lion, but he is by no means a dead one. A quiet man of powerful silences, whose eyes can be ruthless, and his lips wise. A man who appears disembodied on first introduction, for one overlooks the rest of him under the domination ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... the maid) with both hands, and peremptorily demands to be informed why I "don't jump on that fake called Spiritualism." O I don't know, unless it's because more corporeal things than spooks continue to jump on me. It seems a waste of energy to criticize disembodied spirits who do no worse than "revisit the pale glimpses of the moon." I have never heard of a ghost robbing other than its own grave. They are not addicted to despoiling widows and orphans, then putting up ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... interpreter of truth.—This is not to say that the subject matter taught is unimportant, nor that the lessons presented are immaterial. It is only to say that life responds first of all to life. Truth never comes to the child disembodied and detached, but always with the slant and quality of the teacher's interpretation of it. It is as if the teacher's mind and spirit were the stained glass through which the sunlight must fall; all that passes through the medium of a living personality ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... water-thrush,—whose song is likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of youthful joyousness in it, as if the bird had just had some unexpected good fortune. For nearly two years this strain of the pretty walker was little more than a disembodied voice to me, and I was puzzled by it as Thoreau by his mysterious night-warbler, which, by the way, I suspect was no new bird at all, but one he was otherwise familiar with. The little bird himself seems disposed ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... to that bourne whence no traveller returns,' and we fervently trust and hope that the disembodied spirits of the tens of thousands whom he has treated in this sphere will treat him with the same science with which he treated them while ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... which had been thought by men of all times who thought and acted out the Dreams of Power. These clouds settled down upon Him like a heavy fog, and their vibrations were almost overpowering. And also came the hosts of the disembodied souls of those who while living had sought or gained power. And each strove to beat into His brain the Desire of Power. Never in the history of man have the Powers of Darkness so gathered together for attack upon the ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... all of the house of Dhoon, that spirit, disembodied, would frequently be drawn to the neighbourhood of Mirza's descendants, both by hatred and by affinity. Two horrible desires of the Spirit Mirza would be gratified if a Dhoon could be made her victim—the desire for blood and the desire for vengeance! ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... believe this room is haunted," he said, "I once had a rather blood-curdling experience with something like a disembodied spirit—an adventure that came near turning my hair snowy white from fright and horror. I will tell you about it. The original of my ghost happened to be a fellow who committed ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... as he peered at her, seemed like a disembodied stare, for she could see only eyes behind a mask of lavender gray glass eyeholes, with its flapping ends ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... pallid bust of Pallas," he announced. "But that jolly old raven's method of paying a visit was crude and commonplace compared to yours. He came tapping and rapping in the most old-fashioned way; but you reach me with a wonderful disembodied voice through the ever mysterious avenue of the telephone. It really makes me creepy. Won't you locate ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... the impersonal and purely objective nature of his fiction. R. H. Hutton once called him the ghost of New England; and those who love his exquisite, though shadowy, art are impelled to give corporeal substance to this disembodied spirit: to draw him nearer out of his chill aloofness, by associating him with people and places with which they too ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... Divine Word,—are sufficient for the exercise of our faculties and the education of our souls during this brief period of our being, while in these bodies. In God's appointed time, we shall be transferred to a higher level of vision. Then, but not before, we may hope for re-union with disembodied spirits, for intercourse with angels, and for a nearer and more open communion with ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... it is possible for the spirit to quit the body and roam at will in different shapes about the world, returning to the body as to its natural home; that in the spirit's absence the body sleeps, and that it dies if the spirit return not; further, that the universe swarms with spirits embodied and disembodied, because everything in the world has a spirit, and all these spirits are analogues of the human spirit, having the same will and acting from the same motives; and that if by chance any of these spirits be ejected from its body, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... that my personal escape was impracticable, I bowed my neck to the yoke: my servitude was protracted far beyond the annual patience of Cicero; and it was not till after the preliminaries of peace that I received my discharge, from the act of government which disembodied the militia. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... not to be disembodied so easily. On the contrary, as the vessel lurched, he sat down suddenly with a material thud and clash of handcuffs upon the poultry-coop, nor was sooner haled to his feet by the strong arm of Mr. Adams than he struck an attitude and opened on the ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... what you've seen, Lieutenant," I laughed. "But you can make me hear. I've always wondered what kind of a noise a disembodied spirit could make without any vocal cords or breath or any other earthly sound-producing mechanism. How ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... fabricate an approximate effect. And what spiritualist has yet succeeded in summoning spirits at will? It is the crux of the whole problem of spiritualism, to establish any sort or form of communication with disembodied spirits at the single will of the embodied; hence the periodical exposure of the paid medium, the smug scorn of the unbeliever, and the discouragement of genuine exploration beyond the environment of the flesh. There is one moment, and only ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... to be removed, that although men knew that the bodies of the dead had been burned, yet they conceived such things to be done in the infernal regions as could not be executed or imagined without a body; for they could not conceive how disembodied souls could exist; and, therefore, they looked out for some shape or figure. This was the origin of all that account of the dead in Homer. This was the idea that caused my friend Appius to frame his Necromancy; and this is how there ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... enough for its vacancy to leave a very big gap, I can only say that, at the last resort, such dimensions must be determined by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility. Ralph Grancy's was in short a kind of disembodied usefulness: one of those constructive influences that, instead of crystallizing into definite forms, remain as it were a medium for the development of clear thinking and fine feeling. He faithfully irrigated his own ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... as if they rose out of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice," or says of an English country-church that "it made a Sunday where it stood." A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose. But it is not merely our fancies that are pleased. Mr. James tempts us into many byways of serious and fruitful ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the absence of that rancour which had formerly been Allen's most prominent characteristic, and feeling that any information given to a disembodied spirit was safe as far as the world was concerned, launched out on the subject that possessed his ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... suddenness that was absolutely painful all these pleasant fancies passed away, and I imagined myself to be a disembodied spirit floating helplessly in the midst of immeasurable space, enveloped in murky clouds and thick darkness, and whirled hither and thither at the ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... where he was, rooted to the spot, and listened. An awful silence seemed to fall upon the place. Had he hit on the Templeton ghost?—on the disembodied spirit of some luckless martyr to the ferocity of a last century bully? Or, was it an ambuscade prepared for himself? or, was ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... the sheer intellectuality of Monsieur Dumeny, was not convinced that he had reached that condition of moral serenity and purification in which a rare woman can be happily regarded as a sort of disembodied spirit. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... surging and mounting of that in me which I could not resist, several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that space I would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied entity. And then it was that I would write and write. The verses would come rushing from my pen. I must hurry with them before my ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... closely rendered by some such expression as "the Superiors," "the Higher Ones"; and it was formerly applied to living rulers as well as to deities and ghosts. But it implies considerably more than the idea of a disembodied spirit; for, according to old Shinto teaching the dead became world-rulers. They were the cause of all natural events,—of winds, rains, and tides, of buddings and ripenings, of growth and decay, of everything desirable or dreadful. They ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... that spirits, both embodied and disembodied, incarnate and excarnate, considered as a mass, may act as the terrurgic spiritual body and brain of the planet; subjective and responsive to the inspiration and guidance of the universal cosmic mind, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... signed by men with any number of capital letters after their names: cool-headed scientists, university professors, psychologists, grave students all, who were constantly finding new and wonderful mediums, and achieving communication with the disembodied. He could tell them a few things; only, of course, he wouldn't make a fool of himself. He could show them something, too, when the secret agents of ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... said I, and I am afraid I could not hide the horror that ran through me at the thought. "And when you once see our happy country, you could no more be persuaded to return to America than a disembodied spirit could be persuaded to return to ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... to keep his attention fixed. Images, sensations began to chase each other across his mental field of vision; and his thought, though definite as to detail, grew increasingly broken and incoherent, small matters in unseemly fashion jostling great. He wondered concerning those first steps of the disembodied spirit, when it has crossed the threshold of death; and then, incontinently, he passed to certain time-honoured jokes and impertinent follies at Eton, over which he, and Roger and Major St. Quentin had laughed a hundred times. They ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... themselves, as I know Ada has been doing lately—though in the end she came to me, or rather I went to her, for, after all, I am living in the same world with the rest of them. I have not passed over to the other side yet, and while I stay I am not going to be treated as if I were a disembodied spirit. I have eyes of my own, and ears too, and I can see as well as the next ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... immortality or no. He will certainly not believe there is any post mortem state of rewards and punishments because of his faith in the sanity of God, and I do not see how he will trace any reaction between this world and whatever world there may be of disembodied lives. Active and capable men of all forms of religious profession to-day tend in practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether. So, to a greater degree, will the kinetic men of the coming time. We may find that issue interesting enough when we turn over the leaf, but at present ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... His intellectual movements have this as an end in complete reversal of the case with man. With the brute the intellect seems incidental to the body. With man the body is incidental to the intellect. One feels for this reason that man might live a purely spiritual and disembodied life. No one from this standpoint thinks ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... to escape. Often an insect or a stone is thought to harbour the spirit. As shown by Sir E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture, [123] the breath, the shadow and the pupil of the eye were sometimes held to be or to represent the soul or spirit. Disembodied spirits are imprisoned in a tree or hole by driving nails into the tree or ground to confine them and prevent their exit. When a man died accidentally or a woman in childbirth and fear was felt that their spirits might annoy or injure the living, a stake ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... again the Bible gives us hope: "I believe," says the Creed, "in the resurrection of the flesh." The Bible teaches us to believe, that we, each of us, as human beings, men and women, shall have a share in that glorious day; not merely as ghosts, and disembodied spirits—of which the Bible, thanks be to God, says little or nothing, but as real live human beings, with new bodies of our own, on a new earth, under a new heaven. "Therefore," says David, "my flesh shall rest in hope;" not merely my soul, my ghost, but my ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... a further interest as revealing the unique character of the Icelandic ghost or phantom. In other literatures the spirit returned from the dead is a thin, immaterial, disembodied essence, a faint shadow of its former self; in Icelandic legend the spirit returns in full possession of its body, but more evil-disposed to mankind than before death. It fights and wrestles, pummels its adversary black and blue, it is huge and bloated ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... Gospel of Matthew, which may be called the parable of the judgment, Jesus taught that the moral order is not changed by the transition from bodily to disembodied existence. The thoughts which men think, and the actions which they perform, affect the substance of the soul. Evil works misery and virtue leads to happiness beyond the grave as well as here. Seed sown on the earth may grow to its harvest in ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... they together, ten feet, and one tail: and thus they travel through the lands." And as the souls of the dead were supposed to be wafted away on the wings of the storm, Odin was worshipped as the leader of all disembodied spirits. In this character he was most generally known as the Wild Huntsman, and when people heard the rush and roar of the wind they cried aloud in superstitious fear, fancying they heard and saw him ride past with his train, all mounted on snorting steeds, and accompanied by ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... destined for him and the means of pursuing a legal career by the extravagance of his elder brother, he entered the Church, and also wrote largely in Blackwood's Magazine and other periodicals. In 1831 he pub. The Disembodied and other Poems; The Philosophy of Unbelief (1835) attracted much attention. His largest work was Lives of Illustrious and Distinguished Irishmen, and his latest publication The Idolatress ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... well"—well with the living—well with the dead—well with those who, notwithstanding all their bereavements, are under the care of Heaven and enjoy the smiles of God—well with those whose disembodied spirits, escaped from the imprisonment of time, have ascended to the unfettered freedom, the unbounded ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... There was no sound, no light, no heat. He had no sense of weight. It was as if, suddenly, his mind had become disembodied. ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... delicate-looking. Sometimes she's almost transparent. In every way she is too serious. She uses her mind too much, and her body too little. She ought to have more of the gaiety of childhood, she ought to have other children to romp with. She's too much like a disembodied spirit. It ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... purpose is "to give light and to save life," but we have never tried to save disembodied spirits. We have written Christianity large over and in all of our work in the school rooms, in the manual training shops, in the farm instruction, because we are sure there is no recuperative energy in the colored race, nor in any other, sufficient to save itself. There ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 2, June, 1898 • Various
... soul shook and thundered within him to repel these attacks upon his Lord and Master. As those unexpected random questions had poured in upon him thick and fast, all emerging, as it seemed to him, like disembodied evil spirits from the black pit of Satan and the damned, it was joy to him to deal to each that same straight, God-directed spear-thrust of a reply—killing them as they rose. His soul exulted ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... think he had been mistaken, And then to be ashamed of such mistaking. His own internal ghost began to awaken Within him and to quell his corporal quaking, Hinting that soul and body on the whole Were odds against a disembodied soul. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... day of work in my hot—houses Sleep was sweet, but if you sleep on your left side Your dreams may be abruptly ended. I was among my flowers where some one Seemed to be raising them on trial, As if after-while to be transplanted To a larger garden of freer air. And I was disembodied vision Amid a light, as it were the sun Had floated in and touched the roof of glass Like a toy balloon and softly bursted, And etherealized in golden air. And all was silence, except the splendor Was immanent with thought ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... discussed, it was found very difficult to abstract the form of the object from the content presented; still more difficult to obtain an effect of interest at all without the entrance of an element of form into the space arrangement. Disembodied intellectual interest was the problem, and the device finally adopted seemed to present, in as indifferent a form as possible, a content whose low degree of absolute interest was compensated for by constant change. Stamps of various countries in black and white reproductions ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... these parted friends made a last show of union and harmony. In nothing had their amity been more fatally broken than in this careful homage to its forms; and now, as they walked up and down in the moonlight, they were of the saddest kind of apparitions,—not mere disembodied spirits, which, however, are bad enough, but disanimated bodies, which are far worse, and of which people are not more afraid only because they go about in society so commonly. As on many and many another night of summers ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... did not fear men! I was free—I was a soul at last. I had won the victory, I went my way as a god. I had renounced, I had given up fear, I had given up my self. My mind was made up, and I never change my mind. I had passed the death-sentence upon myself, I walked through the streets as a disembodied soul—as the Captive dragged ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... I had proved the balloon answer wrong, I was badly puzzled. The idea of a disembodied light was the hardest thing to swallow that I'd come across ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... immediately from such an applicant as himself; and he had less than a dollar. He explained something of this over the wire, adding that if Markley would see Flavilla at the end of the day the money would be forthcoming. That, the crisp, disembodied tone replied, was impossible; he must call in the middle of the morning, but no difficulty would be made about his bill; Doret could send the amount ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tone, addressing himself directly to Enrica, on whom he gazed with a tender expression—he was far too much engrossed with her and with the subject to heed Trenta's feeble remonstrance—"I believe in the mystic essence of soul to soul—I believe in the reappearance of the disembodied spirit to its kindred affinity still on earth—still clothed with a fleshly garment. I believe in those magnetic influences that circle like an atmosphere about certain purified and special natures, binding them together in a closely-locked ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... the now disembodied voice. "What we call spirit, psychic force, hypnosis, spiritualism, the fourth dimension, is really only life on another scale of vibration. If we could see the whole scale, we would recognize it as a vast, coherent, perfectly natural and rational whole, in which we human beings fill but a very insignificant ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... suit? Can you picture Ephraim Tutt with his hair cut short or in an Ascot tie, any more than you can envisage him in riding breeches or wearing lilacs? No! There is but one Mr. Tutt, and these are his only garments. He who steals my hat may steal trash, but without it I should be like a disembodied spirit unable to ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... contact with an object suitable for its apprehension. Like Eliphaz, I felt the hair of my head stand up—not from terror, but simply, as it seemed, from the presence and its strangeness. Like others also of whom I have read, who believed themselves in the presence of the disembodied, I could not speak. I tried, but as if the medium for sound had been withdrawn, and an empty gulf lay around me, no word followed, although my very soul was full of the cry—Charley! Charley! And alas! ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... that the disembodied spirits of those whom we have loved and respected here are still, though invisible, watching over us with tender solicitude. Such a realization must be chastening in its influence, for who would do an unworthy deed, believing his every act visible to those ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... 'There are material necessities. You are one of them. The most necessary in the world. You may be harmonious, but you are material, too. That is why I love you. I couldn't be crazy about a melodious breath of air ghosting around the back yard. And I am not strong for disembodied minds, either. They make me nervous. They sound like skulls and cross-bones, and whitening skeletons to me. I love you, your arms, your face, all of you. It may not be proper to talk about it, but I love it. Can ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... should we see the true relations between God and ourselves, the true meaning and worth of His beneficent presence, if we could behold a lost soul at the moment of its final and judicial reprobation, a few moments after its separation from the body and in all the strength of its disembodied vigour and the ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... us in a hurry. "A character," he said, "remains just the same character for all that it's been disembodied. That's a thing we too often forget. People with a certain strength or fixity of purpose may have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity of purpose—most haunting ghosts, you know, must be as one-idea'd as monomaniacs ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... may date my first impression of what one calls "the real man" (as if it were more real than the poet of the disembodied verses!) from an evening in which he first introduced me to those charming supper-houses, open all night through, the cabmen's shelters. I had been talking over another vagabond poet, Lord Rochester, with a charming and sympathetic descendant ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... of love for one woman, his love for another will. You can see how I love Sylvia, but you have never seemed so sweet to me as to-day." "It is a sacrilege, my friend, to speak so to me now. You are done with me forever. I am but a disembodied spirit, and escaped hades by the grace of the Omnipotent, rather than by virtue of any good I did on earth. So far as any elasticity is left in my opportunities, I am dead as yon moon. You have still the gift that but one can give. Within your animal body you hold an immortal ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... fact that in the above description of the phenomena of simple clairvoyance I have made no mention of the sights of the astral plane which often become visible to the clairvoyant, and which have to do with astral bodies, astral shells, the disembodied souls of those who have passed on to other planes of existence, etc. I shall take up these matters in other parts of this course, and shall not dwell upon them in this place. But, I wish you to remember that the same power which enables you to sense other objects by means of the astral ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... had reason to know that he could bring to birth and keep alive a fine anger when he chose. Rodney provided a good target for that emotion. And yet at the moment, Rodney and Katharine herself seemed disembodied ghosts. He could scarcely remember the look of them. His mind plunged lower and lower. Their marriage seemed of no importance to him. All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of the world was insubstantial ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... of which the tediousness lay neither in the vehicles nor in the way, but in the amount of both. Or, if one put comparative speed above comparative comfort, he rose before the lark, to be tortured through a summer's day in a basha, or horse vehicle, suitable only for disembodied spirits. My joints ached again at the thought. Clearly, to grumble now was to sin ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... Particularly is this true of some conscientious students who feel they must not take any time from their study. But this denotes a false conception of mental action. The human organism needs exercise. Man is not a disembodied spirit; he must pay attention to the claims of the body. Indeed it will be found that time spent in exercise will result in a higher grade of mental work. This is recognized by colleges and universities ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... very rare) is the Latin lemures, the disembodied spirits which haunted houses and caused ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... The pleasures and pains of cerebration, the delight and the fatigue of it, are felt exactly like bodily impressions; they have the same directness, although not the same localization. Their seat is not open to our daily observation, and therefore we leave them disembodied, and fancy they are peculiarly spiritual and intimate to the soul. Or we try to think that they flow by some logical necessity from the essences of objects simultaneously in our mind. We involve ourselves in endless perplexities ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... the quiet depth of the prevailing tint. Of all this scene, the slumbering river has a dream- picture in its bosom. Which, after all, was the most real,—the picture, or the original?—the objects palpable to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in the stream beneath? Surely the disembodied images stand in closer relation to the soul. But both the original and the reflection had here an ideal charm; and, had it been a thought more wild, I could have fancied that this river had strayed forth out of the ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the seals, no one was found worthy. There was no being in heaven among the angels, no human being on the earth, and no disembodied spirit, or demon, under the earth, who was able to unfold the future. The tears of the revelator are, however, dried, and his drooping spirits cheered, by the announcement of one of the elders, that "the LION of the tribe of JUDAH, the ROOT of DAVID, hath prevailed ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... proportion; while another declared that he found there the evidence of Plato's doctrine of the identity of the good and the beautiful—for this face was so lovely because it was the mirror of a soul which had been disembodied in the plenitude of maiden purity and virtue, unjarred by any discord; and this gave rise to a vehement discussion as to the essential nature of beauty ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... can be covered with the film. If they weren't, I'd present the somewhat remarkable spectacle of a pair of disembodied eyes ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... could return," said he, "the time appointed by my adversary for my execution will be past, and I shall feel for my mother's sorrows with the sympathy of a disembodied spirit." ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... Geneva, as stated in his "Palingenesie," are substantially in accordance with those of Locke, and have met with similar treatment. He is not a Materialist; he admits a real distinction, as well as a close union, between the soul and the body; he speaks even of the possible existence of disembodied souls or pure spirits; he affirms the immateriality of the thinking principle; and expressly assigns his reasons for not being a Materialist.[168] But he appears to have thought, as Locke did, that possibly the power of thinking ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... omnipresent, in which man's chief endeavours is given to win the good will or avert the anger of the ghosts and gods to whom he has himself given being. And the end, the last stage of the pilgrimage, is a world in which mechanical operations take the place of disembodied intelligences, or of supernatural powers. From a world in which the gods are everything and do everything to a world in which the gods are nothing and do nothing. The story of that transition is the record of one of the greatest revolutions that has happened in the ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... going over my notes and those of Dr. Randall, I'm a little shaken, I confess. So far as human evidence goes these men prove that there is a world of phenomena ignored by science. I don't go so far as to say that these doings were the work of disembodied spirits, but I do admit that I am puzzled by things which I have witnessed with one sense or another. The things seem to tally in a most convincing way. This girl is repeating, substantially, the same phenomena witnessed by Crookes twenty-five ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... it are not so much materialist as confusedly Calvinist, they are chiefly occupied in educating the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of a singular depression about what one can do with the populace, combined with a strange disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity. These essential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more liberal and universal parts of Calvinism, such as the belief in an intellectual design or an everlasting happiness. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... and fairy-like that her famished eyes could hardly believe its reality; but it was real, for she sailed nearer and nearer to its shores, and at last her feet skimmed the shining sands and she floated through the air as disembodied spirits float, till she sank softly at the foot ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... door-knob in the darkness made thicker by the glare of the passing headlight when a voice, disembodied for the moment, said: "Wait a minute, Miss Carteret; I'd like to have ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... I not already said That these things are, that they are quick with life,— Such life as disembodied spirits have,— That they are deathless? Thou need'st not inquire Of me whence they are come, for thou hast seen One of their number on its journey hither. The period may not be far remote When thine own planet, starting from its sphere, Shall fright the dwellers of the stars that skirt Its destined ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... flashed on me that the idea of Hermes leading away the dead female might, in this case, have been carried one step farther; that the male figure might be no living man, no man at all, but Hermes himself actually banqueting in Hades with the soul of his disembodied protegee! The thought filled me with a rapture I cannot describe, and you witnessed my excitement. But, at all events, I saw that this was a truly tremendous departure from Greek art and thought, to which in general the copyists ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... other existing poem to that ideal of lyric poetry which has only lately been systematized by theorists like Mallarme. It has just enough meaning to give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music. It seems to hover in the air, like one of the island enchantments of Prospero. It is music not made with hands, and the words seem, as they literally were, remembered. "All the images," said Coleridge, "rose up before me as things, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... his last word will be, 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace'; not, 'Grant that I may flit for a while over my former home, and hear what is happening to my country and my family.' We may leave it to our misguided necromancers to describe the adventures of the disembodied ghost— ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... northern parts of the Realm it is customary, when an unmarried youth and an unmarried girl breathe their last, that the two families each charge a match-maker to demand the other party in marriage. Such go-betweens are called match-makers for disembodied souls. They acquaint the two families with each other's circumstances, and then cast lots for the marriage by order of the parents on both sides. If they augur that the union will be a happy one, (wedding) garments for the next world are cut out, and the match-makers repair ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... astrologers, the Cabala, and Homer, and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite, he attempts to define the stages by which the soul passes from the earthly to the unseen beauty. A change indeed had passed over him, as if the chilling touch of the abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess to long for was already upon him; and perhaps it was a sense of this, coupled with that over-brightness which in the popular imagination always betokens an early death, that made Camilla Rucellai, one of those prophetic ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... cathedral. The Coda, beginning in A-flat major, with an impressive mood of resignation, illustrates at its close a psychological use of programmistic effect; for the first theme, treated as a real person, disintegrates before our very eyes—becoming, as it were, a disembodied spirit. Nothing can show more clearly than this passage the widening of the expressive powers of music which we owe to the genius of Beethoven. The same effect with a slightly different dramatic purpose is found at the end of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... up against one of the walls, as if listening to something through it! As he gazed it grew plainer to him, and he saw a face, its eyes staring wide, which yet seemed not to see him. It was the face of the earl. Donal felt as if in the presence of the disembodied; he stood fascinated, nor made attempt to retire or conceal himself. The figure turned its face to the wall, put the palms of its hands against it, and moved them up and down, and this way and that; then looked at them, and began to rub them ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... admitted to exist, are not, it may be supposed, indifferent to the affairs of mortality, perhaps not incapable of influencing them. It is true that, in a more advanced state of society, the philosopher may challenge the possibility of a separate appearance of a disembodied spirit, unless in the case of a direct miracle, to which, being a suspension of the laws of nature, directly wrought by the Maker of these laws, for some express purpose, no bound or restraint can possibly be assigned. But under this necessary limitation and exception, philosophers ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... but to fight the fight out till overpowered by the material universe. He told Ellen that they must move to some place where they might hope to find more diamonds, and Ellen agreed—wishing with Paulett that the strife were over and the last agony suffered, and that they were among the free and disembodied spirits. London was their object; for there they might hope to find most of the materials of what was now the most precious of all things, water; and providing as well as they could for their necessities by the way, they quitted the cavern, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... in the backwater a great peace descended after the hilarity of their feast. Clouds of cigarette smoke kept midges at bay. In the deepening stillness small sounds asserted themselves—piping of gnats, the trill of happy birds, snatches of disembodied laughter and talk from other parties in other punts, somewhere ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... day on we gave ourselves up to telegraphing from our two stations, while my father again and again consulted models of our transmitters and receivers. This excitement lasted a long time and it did seem psychologically certain that in any disembodied condition my father would be likely to recall some important parts or all of this well ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... again be divided. Some are weak characters, dominated by the will of others in a negative manner, as mediums, who are the prey of disembodied spirits desirous of obtaining a physical body when they have ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... body from which, being, as Bishop Butler phrases it, "indiscerptible," it is parted at death, has become untenable. We know that man is one; that all grows and develops together. Imagination cannot picture a disembodied soul. The spiritualist apparitions ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... discredited in the wilder parts of Scotland. The lykewake, or watching a dead body, in itself a melancholy office, is rendered, in the idea of the assistants, more dismally awful, by the mysterious horrors of superstition. In the interval betwixt death and interment, the disembodied spirit is supposed to hover around its mortal habitation, and, if provoked by certain rites, retains the power of communicating, through its organs, the cause of its dissolution. Such enquiries, however, are always ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... thee in the sphere which keeps The disembodied spirits of the dead, When all of thee that time could wither sleeps And perishes ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... from the murky sink Many a disembodied ghost; And Peisander reached the coast To raise the spirit that he lost; With conviction strange and new, A gawky camel which he ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... all in her as still as the grave, and only the spiritual and divine part of her being was active. Her hopes, desires, and aspirations were all such as she could have had in greater perfection as a disembodied spirit than as a mortal woman. The small stake for self which she had invested in life was gone,—and henceforward all personal matters were to her so indifferent that she scarce was conscious of a wish in relation to her own individual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... other? Does perfecting of the spirit mean the smiting of the spirit into unconsciousness? Surely not, and surely in view of such words as these, we must recognise the fact that, however limited and imperfect may be the present connection of the disembodied dead, who sleep in Christ, with external things, they know themselves, they know their home and their companion, and they know the blessedness in which they ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... stood before the fire, one hand on the mantelshelf and one foot on the fender. The long, soft lines of her dark dress were merged into the shadows, and the white arm, the white face and neck seemed to be disembodied. Henrietta, struck dumb by that announcement, and feeling the situation wrested from the control of her young hands, stared at the slight figure which had typified beauty for her ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... taking the proffered hand with dancing eyes. "You actually frightened me when you came around that corner. For a moment I had an uncanny feeling that I was a disembodied spirit looking at my own outward shape. I know now what it feels like to ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... their pain Chains of disembodied ones, Thou didst lead whom thou didst gather Upward in ascent again, With a great hymn to the Father, Upward to ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... in the least surprised by the appearance of this lonely tavern, with the black peat-pool behind it and the high-road in front, along which its end windows stare for miles, as if on the look-out for the ghosts of departed coaches full of disembodied travellers for the Land's End. I knew the sign-board over the porch: I knew—though now in the twilight it was impossible to distinguish colours—that upon either side of it was painted an Indian Queen in a scarlet turban and blue robe, taking ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of whole cloth; the men of Hades had no more to do with our being here than we had; they were as much surprised as we are to find us gone. Kidd himself was not aware of our presence, and his object in taking us to Paris is to leave us stranded there, disembodied spirits, vagrant souls with no familiar haunts to haunt, no place to rest, and nothing before us save perpetual exile in a world that would have no sympathy for us in our misfortune, and no belief in our ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... Lizard knew that there was no danger of detection, yet from long habit he moved through the plant of the International Machine Company with the noiselessness of a disembodied spirit. Occasionally, and just for the briefest instant, he flashed his lamp ahead of him, but though he had never been in the place before he found it scarcely necessary, so minute had been his instructions for reaching the office from ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... into a liquid, impalpable black; they hazed the draped background of the corner into a far-reaching distance; so that finally to Galen Albret, staring with hypnotic intensity, it came to seem that he looked upon a pure and disembodied spirit sleeping sweetly—cradled on illimitable space. The ordinary and familiar surroundings all disappeared. His consciousness accepted nothing but the cameo profile of marble white, the nimbus of golden haze about the head, the mist-like suggestion of a body, and again ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Lord drove out of the man asked permission to go into the swine, they desired anything unheard of before in the demon-world. I think they were not in the way of going into tame animals; but, as they must go out of the man, as they greatly dreaded the abyss of the disembodied, and as no ferocious animals fit to harbour them were near, they begged leave to go into such as were accessible, though unsuitable; whereupon the natural consequence followed: their presence made the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... almost beside himself with awe, at this unbelieveable strange fortune, this real comradeship with the hero of his dreams. To Jimmie this man had been a disembodied intelligence, a dispenser of proletarian inspiration, a supernatural being who went about the country standing upon platforms and swaying the souls of multitudes. It had never occurred to Jimmie that he might have a bare body, and might enjoy splashing about in cool water like a ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... she wasn't, just as he knew that she was a girl of education and refinement. A tantalizing thing to meet a disembodied voice like that, a low laugh, a mystery! The lady might have a face like a dried prune! (Only he knew that she hadn't!) Voices were not to be relied upon. Take that "hello-girl," for instance; she had had the softest lilting voice over the wire, then when he got a look ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... and of children are too feeble for the march, they are forced to stay behind, lingering near their earthly villages, where the living often hear the shutting of their invisible cabin-doors, and the weak voices of the disembodied children driving birds from their corn-fields. [ Brbeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 99 (Cramoisy). ] An endless variety of incoherent fancies is connected with the Indian idea of a future life. They commonly owe their origin to dreams, often to the dreams ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... disembodied soul shall awake to the full realization of the truth which shone so dimly here, the love for that truth will be sevenfold as the light of seven days all in one, which means fullness of joy ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... can well understand how the individuals thus possessed have obtained credit for divination. In this way the damsel mentioned by the evangelist may have acquired her celebrity. We cannot explain how disembodied spirits maintain intercourse; but it is certain that they possess means of mutual recognition, and that they can be impressed by the presence of higher and holier intelligences. And as the approach ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the place Sung by the ancient masters of the lyre, Where disembodied spirits, ere they left Their earthly mansions, lingered for a time Upon the confines of eternal night, Mourning their doom; and oft the astonished hind, As home he journeyed at the fall of eve, Viewed unknown ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... actions at pleasure. One would think that this should be enough for them; and most of them are indeed alive to the desperate risk which they will run by indulging themselves in that body with "sensible warm motion" which they so much desire; nevertheless, there are some to whom the ennui of a disembodied existence is so intolerable that they will venture anything for a change; so they resolve to quit. The conditions which they must accept are so uncertain, that none but the most foolish of the unborn will consent to them; and it is from these, and ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the steep slope, Dante, seeing only his own shadow lengthening out before him, fears his guide has abandoned him, and is relieved to see Virgil close behind him and to hear him explain that disembodied spirits cast no shadow. While they are talking, they reach the foot of the mountain and are daunted by its steep and rocky sides. They are vainly searching for some crevice whereby they may hope to ascend, when ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... Then she "crawled half prostrate" to the barest and highest rocks she could find on the rim, and confessed: "It made a coward of me; I shrank and shut my eyes, and felt crushed and beaten under the intolerable burden of the flesh. For humanity intrudes here; in these warm and glowing purple spaces disembodied spirits must range and soar, souls purged and purified and infinitely daring." Yet here I have heard the wild brayings of hungry mules and the worse ravings of angry men—none of them impressed as was the ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... gratitude; preserve one who shall never be thy rival. These are acts suited to thy original nature, which gives forth sparks of something high and noble. They weigh in the scales of the Kings of Death: they turn the balance on that day when the disembodied soul stands shivering and dismayed between Tartarus and Elysium; they gladden the heart in life, better and longer than the reward of a momentary passion. Oh, Arbaces! ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... took him again, and carried him up the stair—so thin and light was he. The moment they were past the door of her room, out came the mother behind them in her dressing gown, and glided pale and noiseless as the disembodied after them. Hester looked round and saw her, but she laid her finger on her lips, and followed without a word. When they were in the room, she came to the door, looked in, and watched them, but did not enter. Cornelius ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... another view of the subject. I hold that the bodily senses can only perceive material things; and the spirit spiritual things; and hence, that, admitting the actual presence of disembodied spirits, neither could we perceive them, nor they us, as material bodies. They might, indeed, perceive the souls within us, but could only be cognizant of our actions as those of pure spirit; while we, blinded by the impenetrable ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... inspiration of trance mediums by the souls of the dead. Such a case is that of Mrs. Piper, said to have been animated by the soul of Dr. Phinuit and other personalities now disincarnated. It has naturally been argued that if it is possible for the disembodied spirit to occupy and animate the body of a human being, it would, a fortiori, be easy for it to do the same with the body of a beast, where the resistance of will would presumably ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various |
